


made it here alive

by darthtayter



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-22 13:33:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6081267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthtayter/pseuds/darthtayter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is very cliché. She’s sure she’s seen this exact shot on some kind of sitcom, and Britta has not seen that many sitcoms. Sequel to through the empty streets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. May, June, July

**Author's Note:**

  * For [runawayforthesummer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/runawayforthesummer/gifts).



> Jeff and Britta have become a problem for me, and I throw babyfic at all my problems. I tried to make it not super Dear Theodosia-y, god knows I tried!

May

 

Britta doesn’t really get a good look at the baby until they bring it back after a bath, which to be honest is kind of not the worst thing. She’s alone right now, sort of leakier than she’d prefer to be, but at least cleaner than she was half an hour ago.

Jeff…she lost track of Jeff at some point. He was there, she was holding onto the top of his arm with both hands, she remembers that. He told her something, she’s pretty sure he was talking a lot, but she didn’t hear any of it. Just his voice.

He’s not here right now. She’s not sure where he went.

God. The whole thing is such a blur. And now she’s someone’s mother, or something. And Jeff’s someone’s dad. She only saw that kid for a second, but Jesus, good luck little person.

She can’t even remember if it was a girl or a boy.

Britta stares at the ceiling, straining her memory of the last couple of hours, but things come back to her in images that might not be strictly linear. Her own white knuckles gripping Jeff’s arm, rushing and noise and people surrounding her, the rasp of his stubble on her cheek as he spoke directly into her ear, a heavy warm weight being put on her chest. The baby crying and crying, swollen eyes blinking hard at her.

It’s not like Britta was amazing at being pregnant, or that she is in any way ready for this, but she feels so empty right now. She closes her eyes, and she’d maybe be able to fall asleep, but the door opens, and Jeff comes back in with his phone to his ear, coffee in his other hand.

 “They told me it was the record for the whole week. Nine pounds, fifteen ounces.” He pauses, sort of half-waves at her. God, he looks pale. “Yeah, I have no idea. _Yes_ , I was there. God.”

Britta barely manages to blink at him, he keeps talking, and they stare at each other. Eventually he hangs up the phone, goes to sit in a chair, and stretches his legs so his feet are lying on the bed next to her side.

“Are you okay?” Britta asks, and she doesn’t remember yelling earlier, but she must have been, because her voice comes out in a whispery scratch. Jeff starts when she speaks, and keeps looking at her for a second, his eyes bugging out.

“I can’t… _cannot_ believe you,” he says, and he sounds more sincere than she can remember off the top of her head. Well, apparently she gave birth to a baby that weighs more than some Thanksgiving turkeys today, so it’s been a weird day for everyone. She grins a little, nudges her leg into his feet. She’s glad he’s back. “Shirley was on the phone. She’s going to try to come by in a few weeks.”

Britta nods, pushes her head back into her pillows. The bed is lying flat, so she’s looking sideways through the holes in the frame of the hospital bed, and it’s a funny perspective to see him from. There’s a smear of blood on his shirt that she supposes came from her. The quiet is nice though, so she doesn’t ask.

Finally he looks around, as if something is perturbing him. “Where is he?” he finally asks, and Britta comes so close to saying “where’s who?” that she feels guilty all over again.

They bring him back a few minutes later, and Jeff crowds her as she holds her son, settling him on her legs.

This baby is not a wispy theoretical concept that gets in the way of her and reaching things sitting on countertops anymore. This baby is solid and strong and _howling_ , his hands escaping the blanket he’d come wrapped in, and he has no idea of the truly fucked up circumstances that brought him to her, like, for all this dumb baby knows she and Jeff are real adults who planned this and know what they're doing and have a working definition of their relationship and everything.

She waits for a rush of maternal instinct and nature taking over and evolution and womynkind and all that good jazz that she really enjoys, but all she feels right now is sore and tired and vaguely out-of-body.

This probably wasn’t a mistake. She doesn’t want this to have been a mistake. But there’s nothing right now to assure her that it wasn’t, and she can’t take this back. This is a person sitting here on her lap, a person who makes milk come out of her when he cries, which is terrifying. This is _it,_ and all she has is guts and Jeff at her side.

Eventually the baby quiets down a little bit, and she passes him to Jeff (they make the hand-off with as much awkwardness as humanly possible, it seems like between the three of them there are at least sixteen limbs flailing around), and moves over so they can sit together on the bed.

This is very cliché. She’s sure she’s seen this exact shot on some kind of sitcom, and Britta has not seen that many sitcoms.

She didn’t expect to be quite as stricken by the sight of Jeff holding a baby, holding the baby they made together, as she is. He’s helping a lot for some reason; she's kind of upset and scared right now, but a lot less than she suspects that she would be without him. Jeff Winger as the father of her unplanned bastard spawn? Yeah, absolutely, bring it on.

“Why is he glaring at us?” Jeff asks, wide-eyed.

“God, how should I know?” He sure is glaring though, he barely has eyebrows but this is definitely a glare. He looks like _her_ , Britta realizes, and that wakes her up a little bit. Well, mostly he looks like a pinched bald baby with a weird conical head, but there are a lot of her features there if she squints.

His fingernails are blowing her mind right now, like is she going to be expected to cut those things? Shit. Britta knows relatively that her son is gigantic, but empirically he seems pretty damn small to her.

“He’s little,” Jeff says in a hushed voice, and she nods without looking at him.

Britta smiles, but she must not do it right, because both Jeff and the baby are looking at her and they have almost matching expressions of alarm on their faces.

“He looks like you,” Britta says, inching her head closer to Jeff’s shoulder. She doesn’t lean on it, not quite, but she’s so tired, and it doesn’t seem like it would be the most terrible idea.

“No way. He looks…” Jeff’s not great at completing thoughts today, but Britta can seriously feel his gaze, can feel his eyes boring into her. “I mean, he’s still kind of purple,” Jeff finishes lamely.

“Your face can be purple,” Britta mumbles, and she can hear the slurring and sleepiness in her voice, she can’t remember ever being this bone-exhausted. “Your face is purple sometimes. You make this face.” She attempts to copy it, but probably fails miserably.

Jeff laughs a little. “You want to sleep?”

“No.” She’s so tired she doesn’t even know what he’s saying anymore, but she knows that she definitely strongly disagrees. Her eyes are taking like ten minutes to blink when the baby yawns deeply, and she sits up a little, her head spinning.

Jeff is staring at the baby. “Okay, that was super cute.”

“Yeah it was.” She yawns too, and feels Jeff kiss the side of her head, lingering for some time.

Eventually the baby must decide that they're trustworthy enough or realize that he’s stuck with them or whatever, because he snuffles his nose into the crook of Jeff's arm and falls asleep. Britta looks at Jeff, and he looks sort of stunned. She smiles, a better one. Her head has been on his shoulder now for some time, and her whole face is warm, and the baby is breathing deeply, and she’s once again right on the cusp of passing out asleep when she hears him murmuring to the baby, something that sounds suspiciously like, “Your mother falls asleep that way too, you know,” and Britta’s gone, down for the count.

 

 

 

 

June

 

“Just remember he's more afraid of us than we are of him.”

“Britta, that's spiders.”

“Well, whatever, it still works!”

Hank is angry at them again, he has been ever since Jeff hauled him and Britta and like two full boxes of pilfered hospital baby supplies home three weeks ago. What he’s angry about, Jeff isn’t positive, but Jeff’s not super pleased with his son right now either, thanks to a diaper he changed last night that he’s still mentally recovering from. Britta’s still recovering from the horrors he will never be able to un-see, and in the middle of all of this is Hank Perry Winger (the kid had been a boy, so Jeff won the last-name game since hyphens were for people who don’t enjoy making games out of their children’s lives quite as much as Jeff and Britta apparently do), wreaking absolute havoc on everything, a little black hole in badly-knit clothing.

“You could probably stop making sweaters for him. For one thing, it’s June, and secondly, he looks like something you would sweep out from under the couch. I’m telling you this because you would never actually do that, and so you’d never –“

“No, he looks sweet,” Britta says, smiling a strained, closed-lip smile at the baby, who is lying in the middle of the bed, thrashing his arms in the air, his little body taut and curved like a comma as he screams. Jeff will give her this one. She’s been kind of on-edge since Hank had spit-up in her hair.

Although, now that it’s been a couple of weeks, Jeff feels like he might actually be getting the hang of this. At least during the night, they fall into a rhythm where Hank starts bleating, Jeff gropes blindly for the bassinet and changes a diaper before poking Britta enough that she manages to get her breasts out and flop over. Elapsed time: six minutes, but he’s hoping to cut it down to four.

“Oh, hey,” Britta says one night, when they’re all three of them in bed together. Hank is lying on Jeff’s stomach, Britta at his side flipping channels with her hand patting the baby’s butt. Hank’s had Jeff’s pinky in his mouth for so long that he wonders if this counts as moisturizing (it doesn’t, he’ll do that later). She pokes him in the side. “Happy Father’s Day.”

He doesn’t know what he expected her to say, but it definitely wasn’t that.

“Whoa.”

“Right?”

Jeff shifts a little, waits for the crack about Hallmark and a mass of sheeple buying neckties that no one ever wears, but it doesn’t come. She’s smiling sleepily at him, but that’s the only way either of them smile anymore.

“Whatever,” he snorts, and she laughs. “You totally forgot.”

“Yes, I absolutely did,” she says. “I was pregnant for Mother’s Day, wasn’t I? Figures. I’ll get you a grill and a mustache next year, and maybe a pamphlet about the antiquated gender roles that resulted in these bullshit holidays in the first place.”

“Buy me a drink instead, if I have to listen to that next year,” he requests, and she smiles, wrinkles her nose. Hank makes a tiny grunting noise that turns into a gurgle that’s going to turn into screaming in about ten seconds, but Jeff doesn’t move to try to head this off, he watches her instead: watches her eyes get all misty as she looks at their son, then she looks back up at Jeff and her expression doesn’t change.

“This is doing something for you, isn’t it? You’re so on right now. This dad-ing is getting you all –”

“No!” Britta denies way too quickly, and he smirks. She smacks the back of her hand against his chest, but then sort of leaves it right where it landed, so yeah. He’s not misreading this situation. “Don’t be gross.”

“Hey, the grungy pajama pants look is kind of getting me going too, don’t worry.” Britta wrinkles her nose, they sit silently for a minute or two.

“He looks so small when you hold him,” Britta murmurs, moving her hand to Hank’s head, still mostly bald, but with a weird pattern of fuzz that sort of looks like an extremely elderly man’s hairline. She strokes along his head gently, and the baby quiets down, still sucking hard on Jeff’s fingers. “He’ll be totally different next year.”

“He’s been drooling on me for like half an hour,” Jeff says. “I wouldn’t exactly be crying if that stops before he goes to college.” It is weird though. A month ago Britta was two weeks overdue, so insanely pregnant that it made him nervous to see her, like she would pop if he looked at her wrong, so top-heavy that he had to resist a strong urge to poke her in the back to see if she’d list to the side.

“You’ll be sixty when he graduates,” Britta says. “Sixty-one?”

“Shut up.”

“You’ll be drooling then.”

Now he and Britta are just kind of floppy and tired, and their arguments revolve around who has to leave the couch where the three of them have set up camp. There are _three_ of them, that’s alarming too. Jeff has just barely made it to a point where he considers Britta’s presence as essential and permanent in his decision-making and future-planning, and now he has to make allowances for their little bundle of barf and screaming.

It’s mostly pretty scary. This kid is going to start expecting more from him than a warm place to poop eventually, things that he has no idea if he’s capable of providing. And Britta’s presumably freaking out too, they’re both snappy and impatient. He’s told her to fuck off about six times today, and she’s called him an asshole enough that he thinks it’s probably better if he starts considering it a term of endearment.

But the thing is, right now it’s late, and they’re together, and, yup, Britta has fallen asleep with her face pressed to his bicep, and he has his son in his arms. And something like this happens almost every single night. They slow down and come together, and Jeff can feel a whole future that never seemed possible staring him dead in the face.

He looks at the two of them, Britta frowning at something in her sleep, Hank leaking out of…somewhere, gross, and he smiles. This is going to be just fine.

When Britta’s mom comes over at the end of June to see the baby, and congratulates them on making it through the first six weeks (this is before the yelling starts), they just kind of stare at each other, and it’s one of those moments where Jeff can read Britta’s mind, where they don’t need to talk, because when he sees the shock and the weariness and the tiny hint of pride on her face, he knows exactly what she means.

It’s like a bomb has gone off in the center of their universe, it’s been simultaneously the longest and shortest month of his life, and he and Britta have never yelled at each other more about stupider things, but you know…they survived it. And that makes them heroes.

 

 

 

 

July

 

So, in case anyone forgot, Britta gave birth less than two months ago. She is perfectly willing to milk that for as long as she can. For instance, right now Jeff won’t stop cleaning around her and giving her pointed looks, so Britta goes to check on the baby instead, just to avoid him for a few minutes.

It’s sort of a special occasion. The group is getting together for the first time in like two and a half years. She probably should have gotten them to do this somewhere else, but right now if she and Jeff want to leave the apartment it’s kind of a process, starting with about six hours spent just getting themselves psyched up enough to stand up.

Anyway, the rest of them (Shirley) want to see the baby, and Britta’s finding that she’s weirdly nervous about the whole thing. She’s forgotten about the expectations and weight she gives these people, and now it’s all kind of rushing back. It’s like a million degrees outside, and everything feels close on her skin.

“We have to be impressive today, Hanky Panky,” she tells her son (she calls him that more than she’ll admit to under duress. Whatever, at least she’s thinking of nicknames. Jeff just calls him ‘buddy’, and pretty much nothing else, like if he tells Hank they’re friends enough Hank will eventually concede the point). She considers having Jeff give him a speech, but she and Hank are kind of immune to those. “Show me your game face.”

She and Jeff had a fight over how exactly how douchetastic they were allowed to dress the baby for this (Jeff wanted to put _suspenders_ on the poor guy), and then another fight over how their weird mishmash of possessions was going to be displayed (she doesn’t care that she’s pushing 36, she’s had that poster since…well since she stole it from Vaughn, but that’s beside the point). It goes badly enough that she’s still in her underwear when Jeff buzzes up Abed and Troy, and has just barely managed to fling herself out of the bedroom, in bare feet but with jeans on, when they barrel in, both in tuxedos for some reason.

God. Britta’s had kind of a busy year, and she didn’t know how much she missed these losers until just now.

“Troy has a beard now,” Abed pretty much yells, beaming at them. Troy does have a beard, and he looks so different. It’s not just the beard. He grins at Britta. “Troy has a beard,” Abed says again.

“I see it. That’s great,” says Britta. “I had a baby.”

“Look at it,” Abed yelps, clutching Troy’s arm, and then Annie’s sneaking up behind them, and all three of them devolve into a kind of pile of humanity, crying (Troy), screaming (Annie), and standing perfectly still (Abed).

Shirley shows up, kind of elbowing the ongoing threeway hug to the side to make a path into Jeff’s apartment, which is nice for several reasons (they’re getting really high-pitched, and Britta has a headache, plus Jeff’s looking sort of enviously at Troy’s beard, and she’d like to nip that in the bud), and Britta barely says hi before Shirley demands to see the baby.

“We’re here too, Shirley,” Jeff says unnecessarily, because Shirley is aware of this fact, but does not appear to actually care.

So far they’re apparently just a vessel for the apartment 303 reunion (that would be a nice hashtag. Wait, #threeunion! Oh my god!), and displaying their offspring, but Jeff and Britta were never really anyone’s favorite.

Hank is produced, sans suspenders (he ended up in a green onesie because it’s seriously like 90 degrees outside, and his thighs are starting to get so fat and amazing), and he’s charming as hell, cooing and waving his arms, smiling a wide gummy smile that would definitely be annoyingly setting off Britta’s biological clock if he weren’t, you know, actually her baby. This is the magic hour between naps and feedings when everything is rainbows.

They pass him around in a circle, she has a vague memory of doing this with Ben once upon a time, and Britta loves each of them more as she sees each of them with her son.

“Okay guys, I spent four days thinking about this, and you might not go for it, but I'm just gonna throw it out there: Hank the Tank. Right? Right?!”

“He doesn't look like you. Are we going to find out the real father at some point? In May? Or November?”

Annie says something on a frequency that bats might use to communicate, and then buries her head in Abed’s shoulder and doesn’t emerge for like ten minutes.

Shirley coos for a while, asks when they're going to baptize him, and then makes several passive-aggressive comments about what if their baby dies suddenly, what then.

After that, the afternoon is a blur, everyone has stories, and everyone’s been busy. Annie’s finished her first year of grad school, Troy’s building some kind of ridiculous mansion in Los Angeles, Abed’s got a webseries and three scripts for Inspector Spacetime radio dramas under his belt, and apparently those are a thing. Shirley’s older boys are buying cars and going to prom and shaving or whatever it is teenagers do, and Ben is about to start kindergarten.

Things have changed so much. Everyone is so different. Britta doesn’t feel different, she doesn’t think Jeff is different, but they must be.

Britta feels kind of bad, she hasn’t kept in touch like she should have. But Troy was gone until like two months ago, there’s always an underlying layer of awkwardness with Annie, Shirley’s been in conversion-mode lately, and she already sees too much of Jeff as it is.

Oh well. She still has Abed. Abed’s still the best.

Speaking of Abed, he and Troy are campaigning aggressively to have Annie move in with them, and Britta’s sort of interested in seeing how this unfolds. She is extremely comfortable, on the couch with her feet tucked under her, listening to Annie’s resolve weaken as Abed and Troy ping-pong back and forth about all the reasons she should pack up her life and go. Abed’s looking at Annie differently, Britta can tell even if neither of them can, and she can see why. Annie’s always been pretty, but now she practically glows.

Jeff is talking to Shirley in the kitchen with Hank, and the rest of them are grouped up near the air conditioning vent. Once of the things about having a baby that Britta didn’t know about before is that she is always hyperaware of where the baby is, and that sort of extends to Jeff as well, her attention is always split, so despite the fact that she isn’t really listening to Jeff and Shirley, she notices immediately when their conversation heads in a direction she does not approve of.

“Are you going to marry her?” Shirley asks Jeff, and Britta’s head snaps to the side. She doesn’t hear him answer, and Annie, Troy, and Abed have gone quiet. “Haven’t you two changed at _all_ with having a baby? Since becoming a _family_?” Shirley says louder, exasperated. Jeff looks over and meets Britta’s gaze for a second.

“Well, since she’s been breastfeeding her shirt’s been off a lot more.”

“Jeff!” says Shirley.

“Nice!” says Troy.

“Troy!” say Annie and Britta.

“Is that awkward?”

Jeff high-fives Troy later before everyone leaves. Britta decides to just let that one go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got way too long for one fic, so more soon. It's mostly finished.


	2. August, September, October

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> can i resist ridiculous britta drama and feelings? i absolutely cannot.

August

 

Once you forget what it was like to sleep for more than four hours at a stretch, parenting isn’t so bad. Pretty disgusting, definitely exhausting, but not bad. Jeff is cobbling together how to be a father, it’s probably about 60% based on television, 15% Indiana Jones (he always wanted Indiana Jones to be his dad), and maybe some Shirley thrown in, but it’s working out so far. He can maintain that for like practically a whole couple of hours now before he turns back into Jeff and has no idea what he’s doing.

Sometimes Britta seems like she’s proud of him, which he has always sort of been striving for, albeit in a severely low-key manner. Sometimes this even happens when he’s Jeff.

Parenting so far has been mostly sleep deprivation and boredom, coupled with many outrageous emotional avalanches. Hank is thirteen weeks old today, he’s known this kid for almost a hundred days now, he’s barely been away from him for more than three hours at a time. This first summer of having a baby is stretching out like it’s some infinite bubble that he and Britta and Hank are in, a thunderdome with a population of three. And sure, maybe he sort of wanted to name Hank Max, but that is neither here nor there.

Anyway, their days go pretty similarly, although they’ve been able to leave the apartment slightly more regularly, now that they’ve memorized the windows of time they can usually expect Hank to be neither screaming nor disgusting, when he seems to the uneducated eye like a perfect baby who never makes Britta cry or Jeff tug at his own hair.

“Jeff, come here, the baby’s gross,” is how he gets woken up on the thirteenth Sunday of Hank’s life. Britta usually takes a lot longer to wake up than he does, so this day is weird from the very first second. He rolls over and sees her, standing at the baby’s crib on the other end of the room, her hair tousled around her head, her back to him. He stumbles to her, squinting.

Britta’s right. The baby is pretty gross. His cheeks are red, his nose is running, his eyes are crusty, and he’s very, very quiet.

So there’s one of those emotional avalanches, right on schedule.

“What’s wrong with him?” she demands, looking at Jeff with wide blue eyes that match her son’s, and then Hank seems to realize they’re there, he twists a little at the noise and starts crying, but it's very unlike his usual performance, he seems to be taking no joy in the volume his own voice can reach. He sounds different, the cry is low and rough, and he paws at his own face.

“Maybe he’s sick,” Jeff says. Britta’s eyes get even bigger, and she grabs Jeff's arm with both hands, just like when she was having Hank, which he usually tries very hard not to remember, because he likes to keep breathing at a regular rate. But his heart is beating very quickly anyway as he lifts the baby up, and Hank is just dead-weight, he looks up at his father pathetically, waiting for Jeff to fix this.

Shit. Jeff has to fix this.

The next hour is blurry and muddled, he and Britta get Hank to the urgent care at the pediatrician’s office at a pretty impressive pace, considering how slowly they've been moving lately. He hasn’t been here before, Britta had changed their doctors like six times for reasons unbeknownst to him because her rants are usually background noise. It seems nice, or like it would be nice, if there weren’t diseased children running around all waiting to put their sticky fingers on his precious snowflake baby. Figures Hank would get sick for the first time on a Sunday.

They spend about two hours in the waiting room, passing Hank between them. Jeff listens to Britta complain about the innate sexism of all the parenting magazines at her disposal. This has multiple benefits: it causes people to start inching warily back from them, and he finds it weirdly calming.

 At one point she tries to feed the baby, Britta acts like she doesn’t mind doing it in public, for feminism and such, but Jeff knows she doesn’t like people looking at her, he knows she wants to be anywhere but here. He sort of angles his body in front of hers, feels the tension surrounding her break slightly. They don’t talk, she doesn’t send him any kind of signal, that’s just what happens. This is what they do. It’s how this whole thing works. She still stops quickly though, pulls her top back down and puts Hank to her shoulder, and Jeff thinks it’s been a while since he’s seen her look so unnerved.

“What’s up?” Jeff asks, nudging her and leaning back. His phone is in his hand, he fiddles with it.

“He won’t eat.”

They look at each other silently for a few seconds, Britta still clutching the baby tight against her, looking like a bomb just went off.

Eventually they make their way back home, diagnosis of baby’s first ear infection and disgustingly pink antibiotics in hand. Jeff had gone a little nuts at Walgreens and they are now laden with a humidifier, one of those snot-sucker bulb things that he thinks he’ll let Britta figure out, and a thermometer that goes in Hank’s ear, which, hooray for science.

“How did we not have a damn thermometer?” he asks Britta, who is trying to calm Hank’s sad wails, still soft and pained, still worming their way deep into Jeff’s skull.

“Probably because we suck at this!” she says, sounding sort of like she might snap soon, so he takes the baby, lets her sit on the edge of the bed and bury her head in her hands for a few minutes. Hank stops crying at the disruption, he hiccups once and looks up at Jeff, and seriously, why is this baby so fragile? Why is their status quo so easily shattered? Why did they do this in the first place?

Being overly dramatic about babies is for lame people until your child has an extremely minor medical issue and all you can do is think of every worst case scenario. This is what Jeff has learned today.

Also learned: the baby calms down when Britta plays Phish, but cries when she puts on Garbage, so Britta will probably be disowning him any day now.

Late that night Hank is nestled between them in the bed, and Britta is dead to the world, her hand resting on the baby’s chest. It’s been a long day, a lot of the days are long since the baby’s been born. This is sort of like how it felt when Jeff first conned his way into being an attorney, he knew objectively what to do and say and how to act, but he still felt like someone was going to catch him any second, and ask him who the fuck he thought he was fooling. This is way worse. He’s much less confident about this.

“How are you feeling, buddy?” Jeff mumbles as Hank blinks his eyes open (still gross, thanks) and frowns when he focuses on his father. Hank hasn’t really liked either of them today, but that’s probably just because he’s sick. Usually he’s happier to see them, sometimes Jeff walks in the door and Hank goes nuts, arms and legs pumping wildly like he has springs attached to them, he makes this long thin screeching sound, and he looks at Jeff, like oh my god, it's _you_ , I have been waiting here all day just for you, my favorite person.

When Britta's gone and comes back, though, he almost flings himself out of Jeff's arms to get to her, going silent with the kind of absolute rapture that Jeff is pretty sure is usually associated with religion. But he’s not jealous. Not insanely so.

Hank sneezes the saddest sneeze, Jeff didn’t even know it was possible to sneeze sadly. Britta flinches and rolls over as he slides Hank out from under her hand, gathers him close. This has been one of the more educational days of Jeff’s life. He’s trying not to resent that.

Jeff stands up, starts walking around with him. Hank likes singing, he even likes hearing Britta lament her way through Fiona Apple’s 'greatest' hits, but Jeff doesn’t want to wake her, and Hank’s quieting down in Jeff’s arms already.

He pauses at the mirror. He looks like absolute shit, eye bags and…well, not bedhead, but definitely snuck-a-nap-in-a-plastic-chair-today-head. He looks old. He looks like someone’s father.

Hank’s hot, chubby paw wraps tight around Jeff’s finger while he’s looking in the mirror, and it feels like Jeff’s heart climbs directly out of his throat and hits the floor, and he thinks this is probably what it’s going to be like for the rest of his life.

 

 

September

 

A couple of things of note happen in September. Hank is all of a sudden sleeping super well, and ridiculously happy all the time. He rolled over twice, but Jeff didn’t see it, so he doesn’t believe her. Jeff didn’t see it because classes start up and Jeff is now gone for most of the day. Britta doesn’t reenroll, even though she could have, even though she got through a semester last year before she was too exhausted.

And then one day the shit hits the fan, she loses it, and abandons her infant son. That’s what happens in September.

It’s not even a weird day, it’s not a bad day. Jeff went to work, she stayed home with the baby. That’s been happening more and more since summer’s ended, she hasn’t been able to pick up any shifts.

Jeff kisses her goodbye where she lies sprawled on the couch, Hank attached to her chest like a remora. He kisses the baby on the flossy hair just starting to sprout, practically see-through. “I’ll be home around six, I guess,” he says, and kissed her one more time, and Britta starts panicking right there, with Jeff leaning over her. She’s not even fully awake yet. It’s so sudden that it’s like a starter’s pistol.

“Bye?” she calls cautiously after him. “Wait -” but the door closes and she’s alone with her son, who is blissfully tugging on the neck of her pajamas.

Britta would like to think that this sprang up on her suddenly, but really it’s been quite a while, maybe since she was still pregnant. When Hank was weighing heavily on her with every step she took, before she even knew who he was.

She knows him now. Loves him. Britta loves this baby with an urgency that has completely destroyed her. Right now she wants to set him gently in his crib, wind up the ugly mobile Jeff’s brother gave them, and run, never looking back.

She doesn't fantasize about leaving behind nothing but dust and footprints every day. Not every single day. Maybe Past Britta was a rolling stone but the whole reason she came home in the first place was to get things figured out, become a real adult, maybe exorcise the more persistent of her demons in the bargain. That was almost a decade ago. She’s different now. She got something sort of maintainable going on with her hair, that nose piercing got ripped out on a sweater, she has a degree, a kid, many pairs of boots, someone she’ll acknowledge when forced to as her boyfriend, and they live together, and it’s normal, and it’s great. This is a family. This is her family.

They're sharing an apartment, a phone plan, and a child, so this had better be a family.  Britta has her very own family, and Britta loves her family. Just like normal people.

Yeah, so bartending with a baby maybe isn’t the most sleep-friendly option, but she likes it, likes introducing herself to random moms she meets at the park that way, Hank planted on her hip: Britta Perry, Bartending Associate’s Degree and Leather Jacket Sometimes Wearer.

It’s good, she feels like a badass when she thinks that. She can be one of those gritty old bartender ladies who wear cowboy boots and fling troublemakers out the door with one hand and pour with the other. That would be fine. Britta can pull off cowboy boots. Her life expectations can change into something like that. But she hasn’t had a shift in a month, she knows she doesn’t have a job, and she has absolutely zero motivation to start scrounging for another one.

She brought it up to Jeff, and his answer was to shrug and say something about “whatever, if you’re here at least we don’t have to send him to Dino’s Discount Daykare (Britta can hear the ‘k’ in that sentence).” She knows Jeff is putting money in her account. Because as someone who has known every damn cent that she has available at any time for almost twenty years, she is aware that she isn’t out of money when she hasn’t made a deposit in weeks. These are the things she knows, and suddenly they all add up together: Britta is a stay-at-home-mom, that’s what she is. It hits her so fucking hard. Why is she always so slow on the uptake?

That’s not what she wanted, not in any kind of life she's thought about, and today is just sitting on top of her chest. She feels out of place and wrong, the baby weight has settled awkwardly and it's like she doesn't remember how to wear clothes correctly anymore. Jeff is always tired and she is always angry. Nothing is going like she planned, and she feels like she's stuck in a runaway train, and all of a sudden her Instagram is nothing but baby pictures that Jeff's mom keeps liking.

It’s like she’s an accessory that Jeff has collected. Jeff’s apartment, Jeff’s son, Jeff’s live-in mother-of-child, spending Jeff’s money.

She’s petty and angry and smaller than she was. Well, not physically.

Britta’s day goes by slowly, spent gazing at her beautiful, healthy son. He’s a gift. She doesn’t know what she’d be doing without him, what she _could_ be doing, where she’d be. Who she’d be.

As it is, her life is plotted out. She and Jeff will raise this child. He’ll walk and talk and go to school. Jeff will buy them a house, maybe a swingset for Hank, maybe a garden for her, maybe a walk-in bathroom safe for Jeff. Maybe they get married. Maybe she goes against every inclination she has and wears a white dress while ignoring what Shirley and Annie say, and maybe she has the most _kickass_ wedding and maybe Abed makes a speech that’s hard to follow.  Maybe more kids.

It's not necessarily that it would be a bad life. It's just that it's sitting there in front of her: planned and finished and wrapped up with a bow. Like she's caving to expectations, or like she’s caving in.

So maybe she wakes up every day in the same place as the day before, and she takes care of the people she loves most in the world, and that can be enough.

Or, and here is the more likely option: maybe at some point in the near future she fucks it all up. Maybe she does what she always does, and shoots herself in the foot, says the wrong things, acts the wrong way, dredges up all of her bullshit, the ways that _she_ is wrong, the parts of her that aren’t cute character quirks. The things about her that are fundamentally damaged.

This time it isn’t just Britta and Jeff fooling themselves into thinking they can craft a working relationship inside of the fort they can make out of their respective baggage. There’s a third person involved now. The most important person in her universe.

And maybe Hank is like her, maybe she made him that way by being his mother. He already looks just like her. Maybe bad things happen to her child, maybe things she can’t protect him from. Things that make him guarded and puckered, impossible, abrasive. Maybe he hates her, he drops out, she doesn’t see him for eighteen years.

That's the risk you take if you have a baby when you probably shouldn't. You put that kid out there and it's all your exposed nerves and veins, pulsing right out in the open, sleeping on the bed six inches from your fingers.

They probably shouldn’t have had a baby. _She_ definitely shouldn’t have had a baby. But she wanted him so badly, from the very first second she wanted him. Even back when she didn’t know who it was Hank was going to be, Hank was the one she was waiting for.

Hank coos at her, and she puts her finger in his tiny fist. The strength of his grip shocks her, it does every time. They eat, they watch TV, they nap. They do everything together. They’re practically one person. The clock winding down to Jeff coming home is like the countdown to a bomb going off in her mind, she’s all keyed up and poised to spring.

When Jeff comes back, the sun is still high in the sky, and it makes her blink hard when he opens a window. A lot of things are illuminated for her at once, now that he’s standing in front of her.

Things like: Britta’s hair is hanging lank around her face. Jeff’s hair looks fine. Jeff’s whole self looks fine and normal, and that isn’t fair. She’s wearing a milk-stained tank top that got all stretched out because she wore it when she was pregnant. Jeff comes home from work wearing normal douchebag clothes every day, and smiles when he sees her, plays with the baby even though she can tell he’s exhausted (although playing with the baby right now mainly entails shaking something that either crinkles or rattles over Hank's head while watching TV). Jeff’s holding it together so much better than her, and _fuck that,_ seriously! Her life is in shambles, and she’s always yelling, and she hasn’t left the apartment in three days. Jeff should at least be as bad at this as she is. She _ruined_ her body, and all he did was sit there and watch.

He’s talking about something she doesn’t care about when she stands up and shoves Hank into his arms. Hank’s face crumbles when Britta steps back, he vastly ( _VASTLY_ ) prefers her to Jeff lately, which should make her feel better and superior, but it makes everything worse.

“I have to get out of here,” she says, like an echo, like she’s at the bottom of a deep hole, and the look of confusion and dawning realization on Jeff’s face is something she never wants to see again as she turns and leaves, doesn’t look back. Well, hey, maybe she won’t have to.

She starts crying as she starts her car (at least her keys and her wallet were in the pocket of this jacket). Her face is burning and achy before she stops, snot dripping all the way down to her neck.

She's bad Britta, hypocrite Britta, villain Britta, the worst person in the world who is abandoning her only child, this is what a _horrible_ person does.

Jeff won’t forgive her for this. Not for leaving her son behind, _their_ son behind. They've been together for more than a year now, they’ve been living together for ten months, and she’s run through her quota of allowable fuck-ups. This is the fuck-up that hits Jeff where he lives. This is the fuck-up that ends it.

Britta has been driving around aimlessly for two hours, skipping every freeway exist she passes. She hasn’t gone more than ten miles in any direction from her apartment – from _Jeff’s_ apartment.

She calls Shirley, mostly so someone will tell her how awful she is, somewhat so that someone will tell Jeff what’s going on, because he’s maintaining conspicuous radio silence, her phone is just sitting there, blank.

When Shirley picks up, Britta starts talking so fast, she cries again, she curses a lot, and she’s honestly amazed that Shirley understands any of it, but she doesn’t get what she was looking for when she made the phone call.

“Everything is going to be okay. Kids are hard, and this happens to everyone. Go home to your husband, pumpkin.”

“Jeff - he is _not -_ ” Britta begins, extremely offended, but sputters into silence quickly. “Did you talk to him?”

“Hmm,” Shirley says indecisively, leading Britta to conclude that she has. “Britta, listen, you haven’t done anything bad. This is what happens. You and Jeff are doing just fine, I would never in a million years have thought you two could take care of anything more complicated than a rock -”

“I had cats!” Britta interrupts.

“-but this _happens_. You’re a good mother, anyone can see that. That boy loves you. Those boys, they both love you.”

“I don’t think I can do this,” Britta says, sick to her stomach at the thought of facing them, but unable to imagine doing anything else.

“Of course you can. The two of you definitely have some parts missing but you're still just normal people, good people, and good people can raise the babies they made, however stupidly they may have made them.” Which is extremely comforgressive.

“Did you talk to Jeff?” Britta asks again, she is very drained, she feels like she’s been wrung out to dry.

“Go home, baby. He’ll be there.”

“Okay. Yeah, okay.”

“See you at Christmas.”

She waffles for another hour, but by then her boobs hurt like a bitch. Britta gets home almost exactly four hours after she walked out the door, and she’s greeted by Hank wailing, and Jeff sitting with him on the couch looking frazzled. He doesn’t notice her come in, he’s trying to talk some sense into their four and a half month-old as he waves a bottle in the baby’s face.

“Okay, buddy, I know you’re mad, but she's not here. You have to drink this.”

“Hey,” says Britta, and Jeff looks up at her, a string of emotions fly across his face, relief and anger and apprehension and something else that she doesn’t want to work out just yet. “I’m sorry,” she says right away.

“You’re sorry,” Jeff repeats, but not in a cutting way. Hank is crying so hard, his face purpling, and Jeff hands him to Britta almost hesitantly. She holds him tightly for a second, breathes deep, then mechanically unbuttons her shirt with one hand, sits on the couch.

Whenever the baby stops crying, the silence is sort of deafening, and never more so than right now, with Jeff staring at her so blatantly.

“So?” Jeff asks, very carefully, like she’s some kind of rabbit he might spook into the bushes. “You just ran out of here.”

“I was…it just got to be a lot. Staying home with him. I just needed some air,” Britta says, because it’s kind of true, from the second she left she wanted to go back, and she thinks it will always be that way.

Jeff says something she doesn’t expect: “Oh yeah. Totally.”

Britta smiles shakily, adjusts her hold on Hank, who just tries to grip her breast harder in his little pinchy fingers, like she’s going to take it away from him. “Yeah?”

“I want this to work,” Jeff says, and now he looks more relieved than anything else, like he’s isolated the problem. “So whatever I need to do to make this work, I can do. It’s not going to be like this forever, it’s not permanent.”

“Well, it’s a little permanent,” says Britta, over the sound of Hank grunting. Hank’s permanent. Permanently hers, and Jeff’s too. She rubs his back, sometimes he makes her feel like a deflating juice box. She can’t think of how to make Jeff see how that wasn’t the problem, how she’s the problem. “I thought maybe he’d end up all Britta’d,” she says abruptly, and regrets it immediately, she can feel her face going red. “The worst, right?”

Jeff pauses, looks at her oddly for a few seconds, and then looks at the ceiling instead. “Britta. Know that this is extremely uncomfortable, so I’m only going to say it once, and that will be it for my entire life, okay? Say we, more likely you, drop Hank down the stairs one day and he, due to the resulting head injury, develops terrible taste, ignores me for his entire childhood, and turns out exactly like you…you know, I would be proud. He’d be brave, and he’d be caring, and determined and all that other stuff I don’t actually hate. About you.”

Sometimes she honestly thinks she’s broken because her heart can’t hold all the love she has for Jeff and this baby.

She and Jeff don’t look at each other, her face is still burning red, but he puts one hand on her shoulder, and they just sit there, awkward and tired and together.

Jeff was right, that was extremely uncomfortable, and she only makes it worse, because that’s her job.

“I love you,” says Britta, softly and matter-of-fact. She tells Hank almost every day, but it’s the second time she’s ever said that to Jeff that she meant it.

Maybe he only says it when he’s angry, and maybe she only says it when she’s scared. That doesn’t make it less true. Or maybe it does. Regardless, right now she feels it, feels it wash over her, like she’s drowning, like she’s covered, like she’s where she’s supposed to be.

Jeff squeezes her shoulder and holds on, while their son falls asleep against her, still clutching at her chest with his tight fist.

“We don’t even _have_ stairs.”

“Yeah. I know.”

 

 

October

 

“Here we go,” Jeff explains to Hank, kneeing open the front door while juggling his baby, keys, and groceries. “Your mom can’t say we never left the house.” Hank chatters back to him, laughing at the movement, pulling on Jeff’s hair and nose, he seems sort of like he’s trying to climb up the old man today, but lacks the coordination and wingspan.

Jeff and the kid are chilling today. He’s been keeping an eye on Britta since she freaked out last month, after he sat there with the baby wondering if she was ever coming back, thinking a lot of truly vile things about her, thinking about doing this all alone. But Britta seems like she feels better since she took a Saturday to hang up her gone protestin’ sign, and she’s on another political bender today, gearing up for the election (although Britta hates elections, he knows this because he asked her “Don’t you hate elections?” when she said where she was going, and she responded “Elections are a cloaking device -” and he tuned out after that).

Things have been going smoothly at Greendale, classes have calmed down, and there have only been three dances that his presence was absolutely required at this month. Britta’s birthday was yesterday, he brought home flowers, and she sort of gaped at him for a little while before stuttering through everything she said for the next ten minutes, which was very satisfying.

Even Hank seems like he likes him a little more now. Jeff isn’t sure what the deal was with the baby loudly resenting him for so long, the only reason he can think of is that Hank had somehow figured out that Jeff was sleeping with his mom. But he seems to have made his peace, he’s sort of roly-poly and happy-go-lucky today, which is a far cry from where they’d started.

He’s pretty pleased about it, he didn’t want to admit that it had been bothering him, because he isn’t a seven year-old girl on the playground, but Britta had noticed.

“It’ll even out,” she told him in bed one night. “I’m his only food source. I mean, imagine if I did everything I do now, but like…also carried you around everywhere and dispensed scotch. From my breasts.”

He’d considered this. “You would be full-service,” he’d agreed, as she settled against his chest and sighed.

“Tell you what,” she yawned, reaching over and drumming her fingers on his stomach, “if it makes you feel better, remind me in like fifteen years, and I’ll disapprove of the first six or so people he brings home.”

“I really should get that in writing,” Jeff muttered into her neck, albeit with a strong sense of relief that she was planning on being here that long, but she’d just mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like ‘phallocentric’ and fell asleep.

In the present, Hank hoots and hollers from his swing as Jeff puts away the groceries, then they settle down. They settle on the floor, because Jeff’s still sort of nervous to hold this kid at any height since he got about twenty times more wiggly (Britta told him to take Hank with him in the shower the other day and the thought stopped him in his tracks), the TV gets turned on, Hank gets planted on his lap. The baby tilts his head straight up against Jeff’s chest to smile and reach for his chin. He’ll be six months old in a little over two weeks. Half a year, and they haven’t killed him yet.

Jeff looks at this baby, and usually feels a mix of pride and knocked-on-his-ass love and trepidation and some minor bitterness at Britta’s crazy dominant Viking genetics. Once in a while though, Jeff looks at his son and all of a sudden he can see twenty years down the line, the man he’ll become. Someone whole and happy and well-adjusted, yeah, maybe. Maybe he and Britta can bluff their way into that. Between the two of them, he thinks they have at least half a shot.

So there you go. Happy kid, happy, uh, domestic partner. Jeff’s totally nailing it right now. This fatherhood thing is kind of a breeze. Hank’s cut his first two teeth, which has upset him, so right now there’s no practical difference between his baby and a velociraptor, but he's happy today, and so Jeff is still doing pretty well in the aggregate, which is where he has always aimed to excel anyway.

Britta forgot her phone, which annoys him, but he’s surprised to see when he checks it that the background is a picture of the three of them that he has no memory of posing for. Jeff’s not smiling and Hank is drooling, but Britta looks nice. She's making that face at him, like he'd just said something she doesn't want to admit she agrees with. Britta _would_ pick the picture only she looks hot in. Whatever, his Facebook photo is of his mom's dog that he doesn’t like.

Actually though (he realizes with a start), the background of _his_ phone is Hank and Britta. She'd sent it to him last week while he played Kwazy Cupcakes during his afternoon class, captioned with " _look how happy munchkin is_ (munchkin being one of the approximately ten-thousand nicknames Britta has tried out on Hank in the last six months)!" He did look pretty happy, and so did she, holding the phone far enough back that half the image is just her right arm, the left clenched around Hank's middle. The baby's arms and legs were a windmilling blur, and Britta's hair was in her eyes, but their faces were in focus. For reasons unknown to Jeff, he'd kept pulling it up to stare at it all day. Of course, when he got home three hours later, Hank was stinky and screaming ("Oh god, take him _please_ ", said Britta who had then disappeared into the bathroom for half an hour).

Jeff idly thinks he should print out a few of these. Maybe put some in frames in his office. That seems like the thing to do. He probably won’t, but he should.

He does change Britta’s background to a picture that he looks better in, but that probably goes without saying.

Hank spends the afternoon rolling his body into things and then getting angry about it, Jeff trying without success to engage him in a round of Look Here Are Some Keys or This Thing Was Expensive And Lights Up Come On Kid, or even Appropriate Things To Chew On. Hank finally falls for Age Inappropriate Cinema, and allows Jeff to hold him on his lap again while he stares slack-jawed at whatever network television has to offer them for an hour or so. Whatever, Britta sticks that poor sucker in front of C-SPAN. At least I Am Legend has a dog in it.

He doesn’t have to be the best at parenting, that was never going to happen, that was a pipe dream on the same level as wanting to be Batman when he was nine. What’s a little more reasonable is being about as good as Britta. Jeff is still here. Britta’s still here. Hank is still here, and Hank is happy as hell.  

Britta bursts in around seven, her jeans grungy and her jacket torn. “The cops chased us!” she yelps, a manic gleam in her eye.

“Hooray,” Jeff cheers, raising Hank’s arms in the air, waving them at her.


End file.
